Tivo’s Rogers: Operator enthusiasm for Tivo/Netflix combo

By Colin Mann

Tom Rogers, President and CEO of TiVo, has suggested that after an initial wariness and perception of Internet entertainment streaming service Netflix as a competitive threat, operators who have deployed TiVo set-top boxes to their subscribers now view Netflix with greater enthusiasm, and a realisation that bringing together the worlds of cable and streaming via TiVo would be appealing to the consumer.

Rogers made the comments during TiVo’s First Quarter Earnings Call, suggesting that with Netflix being the leading brand name in over the top space seemed to be giving some opportunity for consumers to better understand the basic proposition TiVo stood for, which is putting linear television together with over-the-top new streaming services and through a single offering. “You’ve the ability to search and go across the board to find your content and being the leading brand name in the category I think it makes the proposition more understandable and from our point of view we think that will help accelerate the growth of TiVo subs and with that accelerate the growth of subscriber revenues,” he advised.

He revealed that for a while, he was not sure the operator community believed that Netflix was necessarily a programme aggregator that they wanted to support. “I think many at first viewed Netflix as potentially competitive with what they were doing as we began to increasingly evangelise how our retail product is viewed of being able to bring together cable and the best of the streaming world into a single interface with unified search and other features like that,” he suggested.

“I think that cable operators began to understand that the advanced television future was dependent on bringing together those worlds and increasingly became clear that bringing together those worlds without having Netflix as a part of it was not going to be something that would be as appealing to the consumer than that Netflix was a part of it. I leave to Netflix to comment on the period of time it took for them to begin to service that community, but now that they are in a position to do so, I think it’s fair to say that there is a lot of enthusiasm among our operators for embracing Netflix,” he concluded.